Category: Making of

Between all the house restoration work, I had time to do another painting. When doing a full house restoration we really start from the bottom, removing everything what was added to the original structure of house, leaving us with bare walls, without floors and ceilings, left with the rough, basic foundation.

When we are done with our restoration work, a shiny and beautiful surface is visible and make people feel welcomed.

This is what I had in my mind when creating that new painting.
The bottom is made with concrete and the finish on top is created by several coats of lacquered oil paint in a bright, warm and sunny yellow.

Even though I need to apply some last layers, I want to give you a first impression.

Space to store my paintings wasn’t a real problem as I nearly sold everything after a short while, but not all, of course 😉
Those paintings which are still with me I put back in big cartons and shuffled them around in our cave. But then, we had a water problem and it was just in the last-minute I rescued my paintings for being destroyed. Continue reading “Storage for my paintings”

After a long pause, caused by a water damage in my little atelier and due to lots of renovation work, I started painting again.

This time, I layered oil paints over ash and washed them away again and again to create subtle effects. It’s a play of appearing and disappearing, of strong presence and nebulous absence. Like memories, they come and go, sometimes they are very clear and sometimes you wondering if an event really happened or if it is just in your imagination.

Many years ago, when we restored our house, I plastered my very first walls ever in our living room. I just came back from a one week training course where I learned the basics of wall plastering with lime, sand and marble powder. These walls were in a very rough condition, we had removed the old plaster, closed some holes with natural stones and here I came, ready to build up all the layers necessary before the final one could be done. Back then, I used sieved sand with lime and troweled it off. I did not know that the trowel should be made of a special steel so that no traces of troweling will be visible afterwards. My trowel wasn’t such a one and when the walls were try, lots of greyish traces became visible. It didn’t bother us very much but during the last years I became more Continue reading “Plastering a wall with stucco”

It`s already seven years since we constructed a new spiral staircase for our house. Hagen built a wooden skeleton and I put gypsum on it, layer by layer, until it looked like an elegant, old staircase. The final surface was plastered with a mix of lime, gypsum, pigments and protected with savon noir.
One can certainly imagine that time left some signs of wear on the surface, scratches and stains from the daily use. It also had, from the beginning of her life, some fine slopes and dales, resulting from my first attempts of working with fine plaster. Every day I saw it and thought: I can do it better now! Continue reading “Casein-Lime Paint”

Making that painting was a real struggle for me, on the one hand technically and on the other hand emotionally.
I used different blue pigments in different solvents which still reacted with each other long time after I decided the painting is ready, but not in the desired way. The components changed colours and structures and I needed to find out what happened to be able to correct it e.g. use it. Thus I tried different compositions on smaller canvas which resulted in a little series of blue-greens.

The technical exploration was fun and I learned a lot. The other side of the making was more difficult. I thought of a person close to me and to whom I am strongly tight emotionally. Our relation was not that easy over a long period, when I did not get the care I needed, when I did not understand decisions imposed on me, when I was lost and sad.
It changed over the time, as we both were able to talk to each other on equal footing.

That painting expresses all my ambivalence how I see this person: the deepness and the impenetrability, the beauty and ugly, the strengths and weaknesses, infinity and finitude, steadiness.
Hard as a rock on which you can crash, but also can provide protection.

In the 18th century, quinine, obtained from South America was the expensive medicine used to treat Malaria. Because of the high costs, chemists were experimenting to develop a synthetic equivalent, so did W.H.Perkin. He did not succeed in creating quinine out of coal tar but accidentally discovered the colour mauve.

I combined violet pigments with some green mineral pigments, mixed them with a light grey in cold wax and acrylic to create a more soft, subtle, undecided appearance.

Mauve was long time a colour preferred by noble women, such as Eugenie, the Empress of France and thus became very fashionable for some decades but this trend burnt quickly.
For a long time, the greyish violet was often related to old women and not popular at all.
This might change as Pantone declared ultra-violet the colour of the year 2018 and I guess, all it’s shades will become fashion again 😉

I like to experiment with different materials over and over again and try out how they react to each other. For this paintingI mixed blue and white pigments with cold beeswax and acrylic, applied all in countless layers on canvas and the result fits perfectly to the time of the year.
Actually, I did not think much of winter, the painting just turned out like this. I can see some snow on top of the Canigou, about 80 kilometers away, when driving to the supermarket, and that is indubitably a beautiful view, but it’s enough winter for me 🙂

Imagine, you are walking through a snow-covered forest, it is clear, icy cold winter weather, the snow crunches under your feet, ice cones are hanging from the branches. All that I can see and feel in this painting.